Reliability, punctuality and acknowledging others with respect are the foundation stones of good manners. Consideration for others is shown through language, for instance in greetings and introductions but also physically, for instance by standing up when someone enters the room. Polite Actions - Debrett's
My nephew looked at me like a recent arrival from another planet when I told him that at my school all the pupils stood when a teacher entered the room. He also seemed thrown by the idea of pupils being addressed by their surnames: "Try to pay attention, Fortnum." I don't know whether either instilled any extra respect, but they didn't do any harm and they certainly made explicit your place in the educational food chain, so to speak.
Or chalk, in the case of my maths teacher - he used different colours to denote different offences, and though I can't now recall what the designations were I certainly remember the sudden sting and the resultant telltale smudge of red/green/white, etc. I must have looked like a post-impressionist picture on a bad day...
I say thank you to my team at work every Friday afternoon as we leave for the weekend. Good for morale I find.
Two of my teachers sat & chain-smoked after barking out a page number. That was the whole lesson, give or take the odd aforementioned flying board rubber. Times do change...
For starters, it's hard to give thanks if you're uncomfortable acknowledging that you have received something. Perhaps you don't want to feel indebted, or don't want to look needy. Maybe it's simply embarrassing. These feelings are normal - but they can sure get in the way of being thankful. Say Thank You
Yes they do. We now live in a kinder, gentler age. Which I've noticed must have an inverse relationship to learning. You once could safely assume that a university grad possessed some degree of literacy and basic math skills. Not anymore. Could there be some science behind the fear of physical harm somehow stimulating the synapses?
It must have been a decade or more ago now, but an old friend's mother was working at Lewisham College and I accompanied him to meet her for lunch. Perhaps I've spent too long in the Shire, but I was stunned to have to pass through a metal detector and then be patted down by a burly security guard (admittedly in a half-hearted manner).
I am always patted down by security when I go to football, my friends not so much and I always say thank you and ask if they can do it again.
Sitting to attention in a 1960s school... Most of the more elderly teachers at our Secondary Modern (mid-1960s) seemed to hate us, and hate themselves for having failed to secure a proper teaching job in a Grammar School. I think many saw us 'eleven-plus failures' as just cannon-fodder (well, World War III was due to start at any moment!). But we were happy enough when teacher was writing on the black-board (with his/her back to the class) while we chewed up pieces of blotting paper, and tried to get nearest the teachers head by propelling the sticky blob with a 12 inch "made in England" wooden rule. ("...It's a rule boy! NOT a ruler. Henry VIII was a ruler!") (note1: don't worry if you are too young to know what blotting paper or a black-board is, just think yourselves lucky). (note2: many thanks to the spell checker for putting me right)
I certainly made the little........ toe the line when I taught in a comprehensive school on Merseyside in the late '60s early '70s. It was either me or them and it wasn't going to be them. Seriously, I loved it. They were always offering to sell me something that had fallen off a lorry, or asking me if I wanted to buy a 'good dog' (one they had nicked off a building site). Joking apart, the teachers and pupils knew their place. The rules were clear and the punishments too. Happy times.
I went to an all boys Grammar School, it was great. I came away having had a brilliant four years and clutching my 6 O'Levels in my hand (failed Maths and Physics). We had some extremely strange teachers back then, some simply eccentric, some border-line sadistic, but all in all no harm done.